corbin

Biologically, race isn't a coherent ontological classification; you're thinking of ethnicity/culture and heritage. Whiteness isn't a biological classification, but a belief system. Incidentally, part of whiteness is the belief that races exist and are meaningful classifiers, along with the belief that whiteness is worth defending, leading to white defensiveness, also called white fragility.

If you still insist, then here's a speedrun: are they white? Why or why not? The Ainu, the Inuit, Michael Jackson, the Scottish, the Irish, the Italians, etc. Whiteness is one of what George Carlin called "big clubs;" they are defined primarily by power-sharing agreements between political power brokers rather than by scientific evidence. The power of whiteness has been extended in various ways even as science has shown that it is bullshit.

Also, on a personal note, I'm routinely discriminated against because of the color of my skin, along with other physical properties. I don't deny that this happens to me or others, nor do I deny that it is a large part of our society (or at least the USA.) I merely opine that this discrimination is undesirable, unmoored from scientific evidence, and something that we should work to eliminate. I'm not pulling one of those stupid "colorblind" routines.

FYI: I'm posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for "big brain tech dude" authors who are posting "yet another clueless take."

While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a "clueless take," I think it's clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don't like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one's beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I'm not going to take that angle. I don't think it's okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.

With that all in mind, I think that it's worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @[email protected] had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can't permalink because Lemmy is trash; it's in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub's architects, I got the sense that they didn't understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.

(This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined "The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery". This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It's all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system's structure!)

Further, it's not clear that the community's adaptations are sustainable. TBS can't seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren't private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don't want to let them police your lands.

It's very funny that, of my two Lemmy accounts, the sneer-club account has better domain reputation than the programming-specialist account.

At least it's still lactose-free~

Language designers are obligated to be linguists as well. This writeup has pushed me to distrust Graham's ability to design Lisps. In a previous sneer, I wasn't impressed by his languages, but now I'm fast-rejecting them. (Also previously folks seemed keen to defend him when they thought his essays sounded smart. Maybe those essays just sound white!)

This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:

While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren't the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don't cover them in giant metal spikes.

If you don't respect the NSFW rules, then I'm not going to reply to you again.

Oh, you misunderstand. It's not for me.

NSFW

I've been to plenty of shrinks and never been diagnosed with anything outside of neurodivergence: giftedness, ADHD, and autism. I appreciate TLP because it had helped me understand and manage my narcissistic parent.

Nonetheless I agree with your critique of the writing style; it's got all the fake edge of a 20s frat boy learning about existentialism for the first time.

In the sense that TLP isn't Blackbeard, no, we don't. But I would suggest that, unlike Scott, TLP genuinely understands the pathology of narcissism. Their writing does something Scott couldn't ever do: it grabs the narcissist by the face and forces them to notice how their thoughts never not involve them. As far as I can tell, Scott's too much of a pill-pusher to do any genuine psychoanalysis.

Also, like, consider this TLP classic. Two things stand out if we're going to consider whether they're Scott in disguise. The first is that the dates are not recent enough, and indeed TLP's been retired for about a decade. The second is that the mythology and art history are fairly detailed and accurate, something typically beyond Scott.

(In true Internet style, I hope that there is a sibling comment soon which shows that I am not just wrong, but laughably and ironically wrong.)

Let's see how long HN takes to ban yet another literal Nazi.

What really gets me is that we never look past Schrödinger's version of the cat. I want us to talk about Bell's Cat, which cannot be alive or dead due to a contradiction in elementary linear algebra and yet reliably is alive or dead once the box opens. (I guess technically it should be "alive", "dead", or "undead", since we're talking spin-1 particles.)

At risk of being NSFW, this is an amazing self-own, pardon the pun. Hypnosis via text only works on folks who are fairly suggestible and also very enthusiastic about being hypnotized, because the brain doesn't "power down" as much machinery as with the more traditional lie-back-on-the-couch setup. The eyes have to stay open, the text-processing center is constantly engaged, and re-reading doesn't deepen properly because the subject has to have the initiative to scroll or turn the page.

Adams had to have wanted to be hypnotized by a chatbot. And that's okay! I won't kinkshame. But this level of engagement has to be voluntary and desired by the subject, which is counter to Adams' whole approach of hypnosis as mind control.